Hello everyone! I'm NOIA from TBS and I wanna welcome you all to The Beginning Major Update!
Our first free side adventure for Omen Exitio: Plague is finally out and I can't wait to tell you everything about it!
Before we jump straight to the features of this new story, I’d like to make a disclaimer: the content is available to everyone who owns a copy of the original game. You’ll just have to update the product in your Steam library and you’re good to go. I’ll call it DLC, from time to time, but, since it's free, we decided to not bother our players by making them download stuff from a new Steam page.
THE BEGINNING: FEATURES
Here you can see what's new, even though the main difference between the DLC and the original game is the way we decided to approach the narration in itself, trying out a different concept.
- 💾 Play ~1 hour of brand new content for free.
- 💉 Live a new adventure in the Omen Exitio: Plague universe. Get back to Zanzibar to discover what happened before Jake Hungtington's arrival and how the plague started spreading.
- 👋 Meet a brand new cast of characters, as well as some old acquaintances from the original game.
- ✏️ Immerse yourself in the narration thanks to 200+ brand new images, more detailed and unique than ever.
- 📕 Read Eric's diary as it gets written: dive into his psyche, create a bond.
- 🏅 Unlock new story-driven achievements, one for each different ending.
- 🌎 Enjoy new animated menus.
WHY RELEASE NEW CONTENT?
Now, with the list of features out of the way, let me tell you a little more!
This DLC was born from the need to explore, from that persistent urgency to experiment and learn more about the craft you're trying to cultivate.
Even if it's a simple game, working on a project like Omen Exitio: Plague requires a team to deeply understand the subtle ways different inputs intertwine in narrating an immersive story for the player to experience. This is no mundane task, as it refers to the abstract process of creating fragile and fluctuating structures of sense and meaning capable of activating that strange "feeling of somehow being there", and connecting them with the totality of the scene just through a delicate flow of empathy.
Now, this is true for a lot of games (and many of those managed to create great stories) but becomes increasingly difficult the more you reduce the sparkle and go back to the basics. In the end, it's just easier to fail because everything becomes pretty much transparent, and things either work or they don't. That's why we continue to experiment on OE:P, trying out new possibilities, searching for a way to tune things just right, to create a perfect equilibrium between all the elements that compose the game.
As always, I got a bit overexcited about all this stuff! What I was trying to convey was the experimental nature of this DLC, as I truly hope that all of you will share your experience with us to keep Omen growing and improving.
NARRATIVE THOUGHTS
The Beginning tells a story about ordinary people, not the chosen ones (yes I'm looking at you Jake Hungtington). It's hard to be remembered when you're not destined to greatness: people tend to forget, to believe that maybe your story doesn't need to be told, that you may not have been worth it. Eric McLane and his comrades are just like you and me: human beings with their own flaws, fears and regrets, who stumbled upon something way bigger than them. This is a tale of struggle and friendship, of people who are unable to let hope go, who will fight tooth and nail to not drown in the darkness that shapes their path.
With Eric and his crew, we tried to create deeper characters and deeper connections between them. The player choices, while still providing active and concurrent outputs in the scene, have a bigger focus towards the subtle shifting in the relationships you develop with the other characters in the long run. I think that, even if you play as Eric, the DLC proposes a refined sense of aggregation, which makes it easier for the player to empathize with all the protagonists and the story itself.
In the end, to put it as our narrative designer did when the idea of the DLC was first pitched: “choices shape your world and not just yours on a daily basis, second by second. It’s hard for someone to have a full understanding of the articulated consequences of their actions because there is a complex ecosystem of inputs and outputs, constant noise, and way too many factors to consider. What you do has a different type of influence on who’s around you and group dynamics constantly change. That’s why, if we want to move our narrative forward, we have to try and interact with more complex systems in a controlled environment, where everything can't just blow up in our face because we've gotten too far. And that’s exactly what we will do with this DLC, focus our attention on groups and the interaction between those".
Now, I care a lot about this game and my opinions are quite biased, but I think the results are good. As said, this process has been incredibly important for our team, and hopefully, we are now ready to take a step towards a higher quality standard.
And this brings me to the next topic I wanted to touch upon: what happens next.
WHAT’S NEXT?
We are already working on the next side adventure which will bring together what we learned in producing the original game and this first DLC. I can't tell you much right now, but we will delve into a story that has one of the OE:P's characters as the protagonist, and that will reach a deeper level of narrative complexity and structural integrity. Hopefully, it won't take too long before I'm able to share some more info with you guys.
In the meantime be sure to follow us on Instagram because there is some pretty interesting stuff coming for the Omen Exitio tales.
Thanks a lot (especially if you read the whole post)!
NOIA and the TBS team
